Advancing impact through investment advising
Snapshot
Hometown:
Current Location:
Current Title:
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Delta State, Nigeria
New York Area
Director, Head of Sustainable Investing, Crewcial Partners
Investment Analyst – Impact and Sustainability, Soros Fund Mgmt
Senior Management Associate, Bridgewater Associates
FP&A Manager, Twinings Ovaltine
Balancing financial and impact returns
Pre-Fuqua, I was on a traditional finance professional path (investment banking, business strategy, FP&A executive, etc.). I came back to business school, and Fuqua specifically, because I needed to learn how to layer an impact lens onto all that experience without losing the rigor that comes with a corporate finance/investment mandate.
Post-Fuqua, I have stayed in the investment space and, each day, I continue to experience the complexity that is the relationship between chasing financial and impact returns without compromising on either. While it is continually hard, I find it meaningful and look to the day where this association between two, sometimes seemingly opposing, ideas becomes commonplace in the investing world.
In my current role, I spend my days…
Working with my team to ensure that we are being thoughtful about our integration of sustainability factors into our investment portfolios. On some days, this involves me meeting asset managers as part of our due diligence process before we allocate capital to them. On other days, it might look like meeting with our clients (the asset owners) to understand their portfolio objectives and align our values. My day might also involve meeting with my colleagues internally to assess our performance, or speaking on a panel at a conference where we find opportunities to engage with other stakeholders and partners at the intersection of investing and impact.
As I write this, I have spent the better part of my day probing data from our ESG data provider with our internal technology team to ensure that the portfolio reporting functionality of our ESG Assessment Framework is properly crunching some new data feeds we have received. Fingers crossed, we are close to completing the process and it’s all in a day’s work!
A recent impact highlight I am proud of
I designed and implemented Crewcial Partners’ Proprietary ESG Assessment Framework which jumpstarts our sustainability Integration process across the roughly $30 billion of assets we advise for our clients. The framework provides reporting that enhances our overall due diligence process and acts as a risk assessment tool for our investment team to determine exposure to different sustainability factors, and execute risk mitigating measures that eliminate negative impact to portfolio bottom lines.
A mindset I recommend cultivating
Impact leaders must embrace that no one person, organization, government body, et cetera, will ever be able to provide complete and scalable solutions in a silo—think climate justice, water scarcity, wage inequality, affordable housing, the list goes on. Therefore, I recommend a mindset centered around three words: ambition, iteration, and collaboration. Impact leaders must face issues head-on with great ambition knowing that the answers they seek will not come easy, but that these solutions at scale can have tremendous impact. They must ensure that they stay nimble in approach so that they can iterate as they learn new information, because the work we explore has no defined blueprints and the boundaries can change very quickly through internal and external factors. Finally, they must harness the benefits of growth—sometimes exponential—that comes from productive collaboration to cover more ground and eliminate blind spots.
In my current role, this mindset is something that we are constantly working to incorporate as we build new tools to integrate impact into our portfolios. We work to eliminate silos by ensuring that every member of the investment team is part of the learning and adaptation process for impact integration. We collaborate with stakeholders in the industry at great scale to tackle issues while learning new paths and sharing best practices along the way—writing white papers, participating in working groups, contributing to panel discussions, etc. We don’t shy away from the big issues; instead we find ways to tackle them with diligence, knowing that we will likely need to change our process from time to time. We embrace this reality so that we do not let perfection be the enemy of good.
A valuable piece of advice I received about working in impact
The best advice I received about working in impact was to embrace the zig zag! The career paths in impact are not always as straightforward as other industries and can sometimes feel ambiguous. Getting comfortable dealing with ambiguity allows one to explore with ease and find hidden opportunities that may only present themselves to the most passionate and curious seekers. Master your trade (whatever it is) and stay connected. Eventually the right opportunities will present themselves.
How Fuqua contributed to my impact journey
I decided to return to business school to learn how to think critically about merging my finance aptitude with my interest in impact. I visited Fuqua for Blue Devils’ Weekend and sat in a sample class, which covered the first hour of Cathy Clark’s Impact Investing course. I had been toying with the idea of business school for a while given the specific goals I had, and sitting in that class was the first time someone had helped me articulate my thoughts in an actionable way that I felt I could pursue. I went up to Cathy after that class and told her, “Everything you just said, that’s what I’ve been trying to figure out for myself.” The rest, as they say, is history!